


When Oceans Rise

by myglassesaredirty



Series: It Had to be You [10]
Category: Psych
Genre: Dreamlike, Ocean, Oceans (Where Feet May Fail), Out of Body Experiences, also this would be an lsd experience for literally any other person but this is henry, that being said i have no idea what an lsd experience is like, this boi wouldn't do lsd, this is the second fic inspired by this damn song
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 22:34:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18270545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myglassesaredirty/pseuds/myglassesaredirty
Summary: Henry Spencer has lost everyone he ever cared about. So he just walks out to the ocean and stares out at the water.





	When Oceans Rise

**Author's Note:**

> Idk what it is about this song and me, but this is the second published fic based on this song and the third or fourth overall (I will never publish the other one)

The sand squishes underneath his bare feet, and he moves further into the water. The ocean gently laps at his ankles, the water rising up to the middle of his shins as he wades deeper. The moonlight slants across the water, sparkling on the surface, turning the otherwise black water into a shimmer of silver. He tilts his head, wondering if he can dive into a pool of silver if he just swims out to the moonlight.

 

The air that hangs over him is heavy and humid. The humidity doesn’t really surprise him, primarily because it’s Santa Barbara and he’s standing at the edge of the ocean. Despite the humidity, it’s actually cold here in Santa Barbara, and his breath puffs out in front of him in a cloud of white smoke.

 

They both left.

 

Madeleine left a few months ago, but the pain still flares up every day, every moment of his life. His hands shake when he wakes up in the morning, and they shake when he goes to bed. When he wakes up with nightmares, his heart pounding and his breath fleeting, he has no one to turn to. He sits up in bed, bowing his head, and he questions why he wasn’t good enough. He questions why his marriage failed, why he wasn’t good enough to make her stay.

 

_ (Why wasn’t I good enough? What else could I have done?) _

 

If he could go back in time, he would change everything to make both her and Shawn stay. He’d be a better father, a better husband. He’d give up his badge, find a different job, do anything just so he could grasp what has now slipped through his fingertips.

 

_ (Will I ever be good enough?) _

 

After his nightmares, Henry will sometimes get out of bed and go to the telephone, reaching his hand out for the phone. His hand hovers there for a moment, and he thinks about calling Madeleine, but Shawn was right: he doesn’t have her new number. She’s promised to call him, someday, but that day still hasn’t come. And then when he changes his mind about calling Madeleine, he wants to call a friend, but no one  _ gets _ it because no one has lost both their wife and their only child in the same year.

 

_ (His hands keep shaking, when he thinks about his son leaving. He wants to call his son back to him, hold him close like he did when Shawn was a little boy.) _

 

Henry shakes his head and lets out a shaky breath. Shawn left today. He got on his damn motorcycle and tore away just as Henry ran out the front door, clutching his note in his hand. He was too stupefied to chase after him; well, that’s not entirely true – he  _ did _ go after Shawn, but by the time he came to his senses and got in his cruiser, Shawn was already long gone.

 

_ (He reread the note far too many times than he cares to admit – he still sees the imprint of a black pen on a scrap sheet of paper, telling Henry that he’s just tired of living here, and there’s no point anymore: his mom is gone, the only career he’s ever been trained for has been thrown out the window, and Henry is as shitty a parent as they come. _

 

_ Henry wants to not believe that, but he knows that Shawn is right. He never hit Shawn, but he did arrest him, and he still lorded over him for months. Even Gus is getting ready to leave for college, and Shawn has nothing anymore. So he just got on his bike, left a note, and promised his dad that he would send him a postcard so that he’ll know that Shawn is still alive. He’s not that cruel. _

 

_ Henry can’t help but feel he doesn’t even deserve that small assurance that Shawn is alive.) _

 

He has nothing and no one anymore. His house is massive and empty, and he doesn’t even have a dog to share it with. And maybe Maddy’s leaving might not be so bad, but without Shawn, life is not worth living. If he had just one of them still left in his life, maybe it wouldn’t kill him inside. If Maddy was here, Shawn wouldn’t have left, but  _ if _ Shawn had still run away, at least Henry could turn to Maddy and be weak for just one moment. If Shawn was still here, then he might hate Henry, but he’d be  _ here, _ and he’d be  _ safe. _

 

Henry will not step foot back in that house until the sun rises and he has to get to work. There’s nothing for him.

 

He tucks his hands into his pockets and keeps his eyes on the ocean in front of him. He wonders what it would be like to swim out into the ocean, and just keep swimming, never to stop. At what point would he stop swimming? Would exhaustion kill him, or would dehydration kill him? Would it hurt to drown?

 

_ (At least, he thinks, would it hurt anymore than life hurts now?) _

 

He doesn’t think he wants to die – he’s lived too many years as a cop and slipped through Death’s grasp far too many times for him to be truly suicidal. He just wonders what would happen if he just…stopped existing until Shawn came back or until Maddy called him. His heart is torn into two pieces – his wife, who’s somewhere on the east coast, holding half of his heart in her hand (she knows it, too, and she doesn’t want to break his heart anymore than she already has; and even though Henry sometimes thinks he can hate her for how much she hurt him, he can’t ever hate her enough to hurt her), and his son, who’s torn across the state to get away from him. Without his heart, he has nothing to keep him going. Sure, he’s never been a very emotional man, but that doesn’t mean he never loved anyone.

 

_ (How can you live without a heart?) _

 

He loves his family so much that it  _ hurts, _ now more than ever before. He would die for the entirety of Santa Barbara (by law, he kind of has to), but there are exactly two people that he would kill a person for, and those two are Maddy and Shawn, and neither of them are  _ here,  _ and he would do  _ anything  _ to bring them back to him. He’d chuck his goddamn badge into the ocean, he’d light his own uniform on fire (okay, that’s illegal and he wouldn’t actually do that, but the sentiment remains), he’d do anything.

 

Henry is a man that doesn’t live life following his heart, and he lives by his brain, but right now, he can’t think about living by anything other than his heart.

 

His eyes flick over the shimmer of silver, and something…odd stands out to him. It almost looks like a person, but this person glows white against the silver water, a color brighter and purer than the moonlight. It seems like a light comes from this person, but Henry can still see him well enough to see him raise his hand and crook his finger.

 

Henry glances around at the black water around him and looks back at the moonlit – and apparently person-lit – water in front of him. The offer remains, and the figure keeps beckoning him forward.

 

The choice is an easy one.

 

Henry wades into the water, and when it gets too difficult to walk, he kicks his legs up and strikes out towards the figure. The– the being doesn’t move, just keeps beckoning him out to the edge of the horizon, and Henry keeps swimming. The water, unlike the air that hangs above him, is almost warm, and as he swims further out, the water stays a shimmery silver. He almost expects the silver to stick to his arms and drag him down to the depths of the ocean, but with each stroke, his hand stays the same, the silver dripping off of his skin.

 

If he listens hard enough, he thinks he can hear the sound of voices singing. The voices, though highly possibly imaginary, sound heavenly, lifting and falling gently. It’s almost like these soft voices are calling him to heaven, but Henry still can’t tell if the voices are just in his head or if he can actually hear them.

 

As he gets closer to the being, he can almost make out a face through the brightness, However, before he can get close enough to see who the figure is, the being dives down underwater, and the light shimmers through the silver, and Henry can still see the finger beckoning him to dive down.

 

His heart skips a beat for a half second, wondering if the figure is set to kill him.

 

_ (Though,  _ he thinks to himself,  _ could it really be that bad if that’s what this person is planning? If this is how I go out? At least I wouldn’t have to wake up in the morning and remember that my son ran away. _

 

_ But then he remembers the arguments and how he and Shawn have not had a civil conversation since Maddy left and he doesn’t want to die, not  _ yet,  _ not until he gets a chance to remedy that, gets the chance to tell Shawn that he loves him.) _

 

The figure is persistent, and a flare of white shoots out of the water, curls around Henry’s wrist, and pulls him underwater.

 

At first, Henry struggles, certain that he’s about to die, but in a moment of panic, he tries to take a breath of water, and he finds that he can still breathe, even through the salt. He stops struggling, letting himself float in the middle of the depths. The water down here is no longer silver, and a shimmer of white shines ahead of him, but it’s so far away that Henry can barely make it out. The water is blue and dark, but not black like it was out on the shoreline. Fish swim by him, and all of them are bright and colorful, some speckled with polka dots (Henry makes a mental note to ask Gus if fish can have polka dots), and others orange with black and white stripes, almost like a tiger.

 

The white flashes brighter, almost annoyed that Henry would dare take the time to stop and marvel at the fish. Henry rolls his eyes fondly and strikes out further, pulling at the water and pushing it behind him. A dolphin swims by him, circling around him and whistling delightedly. It almost races him, slowing down until he’s right on its tail, and then the dolphin swims off again.

 

The white light sinks down into a little cave of some sort. The dolphin pauses and swims in front of Henry, blocking his path just for a moment. The dolphin looks at him with kind, intelligent eyes, and Henry’s heart stops for a moment because the dolphin’s eyes look so much like Maddy’s sharp, kind, intelligent eyes, but he shakes his head.  _ A dolphin can’t have human eyes. It’s impossible. I mean, maybe it’s possible that they have intelligent eyes, I remember Gus saying that they were arguably the smartest animals, but that dolphin can’t be Maddy. It’s just not possible. _

 

The dolphin lifts its fin and touches Henry’s arm before it swims away. Henry follows the dolphin with his eyes and then dives down into the small cave. The opening is small, and the water in the cave is dark blue, so dark that it’s almost black. Henry sticks his head through and swims through the hole. He’s just fit into the small cave, and he looks around for the light, but it’s gone.

 

**_Close your eyes._ **

 

Henry does.

 

**_Now open._ **

 

**

 

Henry’s eyes snap open, and he presses his palms to the edge of the mattress. He gasps sharply, short of breath, not sure if he even remembers how to breathe.

 

Wait.

 

He’s sitting on a mattress.

 

Another test of the springs indicates that it’s not even Henry’s bed; it’s Shawn’s.

 

As he stands up and crosses the room to Shawn’s window, his heart pounds so furiously in his chest that it feels like there’s a motorcycle roaring in his chest. He doesn’t register that his hands are shaking until he presses his palms against the windowsill. Still, he just needs to know.

 

_ I swear to God I was in the ocean. I was swimming in the ocean. I saw fish and dolphins and creatures that I didn’t even think could exist. If that wasn’t real, then I was at least on the shoreline. _

 

It takes a little bit for his eyes to adjust to the new darkness in Shawn’s room that presses into him, forcing his heart to beat harder. Finally, he decides to climb outside of Shawn’s window, back into the cold night air.

 

Once he’s out onto the roof, he stops dead in his tracks, nearly tumbling off the roof.

 

About fifty yards in front of his front door, a man stands at the edge of the shoreline. Henry doesn’t need supervision to know that his eyes are closed and that his hands are tucked into his pockets. That man is wearing a blue Leland Bosseigh shirt that his son gave to him. The water comes up to the middle of his shins.

 

That man on the beach is Henry himself.

**Author's Note:**

> Like it, love it, hate it? Leave a comment below or go to my tumblr, @ my-glasses-are-dirty, and tell me what you think!


End file.
